Lana Del Rey announced that a new album called Blue Banisters will arrive on July 4th. She always comes up with cool album names. In March, the day after she released Chemtrails Over the Country Club, she said a new album called Rock Candy Sweet will arrive on June 1st. That never happened. Regardless, Lana keeps things moving and interesting, always finding herself in a discussion.

Apple releases the iPhone update. This recent update is Facebook’s worse nightmare. It gives users transparency and control over apps that want to track them for advertising. The main source of Facebook’s income is ‘tracking’ users and selling data to companies that target iPhone users.

Now, you’ll see a pop-up when you open an app that wants to access your device ID for advertisers. That pop-up will ask if you want to be tracked. Now have the option to opt out.

This will have an effect on online advertising reducing the effect of targeted ads and profitability.

The battle lines are drawn between Apple’s Tim Cook and FB’s Mark Zuckerberg. The love affair has dwindled and they ready to fight. I’m not sure how Facebook will fight back common sense privacy rules, but fear causes rational people to lose their mind.

While Hollywood is still reeling in shock over the Oscars historic ratings crash, it’s time to acknowledge that it’s the end of the era. If video killed the radio star, then social media killed the movie star, while TV and streaming killed the movie theatre.

And the award ceremonies? Forget about it.

Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood reporter for The New York Times, said: “The Oscars forgot about its primary job — to sell Hollywood to the world, to be a big, fat commercial for the dream factory, the kind that makes financiers open their wallets and wannabe actresses get pinwheels in their eyes about the day they might be able to stand on that stage and give their acceptance speech.”

How will movies survive?

“It is a tough market, even for us coming off of ‘Avengers: Endgame,’ to make a darker, character-driven movie says Joe Russo”

It may not be entirely decimated, but it’s a wake up call.

ABC’s Oscars suffered a new ratings crash and hit an all time low. The audience fell under 10 Million for the first time ever. Think about it this way. There are 328 million Americans and less than 10 million watched. It’s as if the City of Los Angeles tuned in and nobody else.

Insiders were expecting bad, but not this bad.

The question moving forward is will these award shows continue to exist in the same format?

The Oscars along with the Grammys, Golden Globes and SAG Award continue all have suffered a steep decline. Why? Because they are no longer relatable and only cater to a small boutique audience.

If the award shows want to reach a larger population again, a change must happen quickly.

Do you want to buy the CryptoKittie? The price to purchase is $1,000.00 today. In 3 months from now, it could double. Maybe.

You heard of NFT by now, so lets talk about it for 10 seconds.

NFTs can be anything digital such as memes, drawings, music, even a tweet. You can more or less sell anything digital. The buyer can own it that comes along with a digital certificate. Jack at Twitter sold his tweet for a couple of million. Grimes made $6 million from the sale of digital artworks while 3LAU made $11.6 million from a collection of limited edition NFTs.

Artists are exploring the NFT world right now. It’s a new method to sell their work.

Lewis Capaldi is selling digital cards called the Fat Sexy Collectible Card Experience. Doja Cat is selling her first collection of NFTs called Juicy Drops.

How did NFTs become the talk? In 2017, John Watkinson and Matt Hall created characters on the Ethereum blockchain. They called their project Cryptopunks which helped NFT become mainstream. Others artists quickly jumped on the wagon hoping to take advantage.

Is NFT just a hype? Maybe. The discussion around NFT is breaking the internet right now, but for the artists sake, I hope it can become revenue stream.